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The Light Shaper: the skate park setup

Andrea Belluso is an experienced photographer with more than three decades in the business. Over the years, he has shot everything and everyone from supermodels and celebrities to fashion, beauty and stock photography.

Once a month Andrea shares one of his most recent setups.

This month’s setup:

The Skate Park Setup

Perfect when:

You are shooting action in the sun.

But also when:

You want a soft and even light covering a fairly large area.

The assignment:

It’s not every day that I get to shoot skateboarders. I mainly do fashion and beauty. But I must admit, I have a soft spot for skateboarders. I’m amazed by the stuff they do on their boards! So, when I was asked if I wanted to do a shoot for Radio Skateboards, I didn’t hesitate.

After giving the shoot some thought, I decided that I wanted to catch the skateboarder mid air. I wanted to have passion, action and a clear focus on the moment. In other words, I wanted to freeze the action but have a little bit of motion blur to give the image more dynamics.

The setup:

For this assignment I choose to work with the D1 monolight, or the D1 Studio Kit to be precise. Unlike the classic Profoto flash packs, the D1 monolight actually provides a shorter flash duration at higher power settings. So, the idea was to keep the output just below full power. This way I’d have enough power to overpower the sun in the background and get a deep, blue sky with fluffy, white clouds. But at the same time, I’d also get a bit of motion blur on the fastest moving parts of the subject – in this case his left shoe.

The D1 Studio Kit was chosen simply because it contains everything I needed for the shoot. There are two D1 monolights in the kit, which is the exact amount of lights I was planning to use. There are two Umbrella Shallow White S in the kit, and shallow umbrellas are the perfect Light Shaping Tool for this kind of shoot. They’re extremely portable, and their shallow shape spreads the light evenly over a fairly large area. The Air Remote that is included in the kit was, of course, used to sync and control my lights directly from my camera. I also brought a portable power solution, the BatPac, to power my setup at the skate park.

The actual setup I used is quite simple. I had one main side light standing camera right, and one fill light camera left at slightly lower power than my main light. Nothing fancy, but very effective.

Hope you like it! If you have any comments, leave a comment below or tweet us at @profoto and I’ll do do my best to reply as soon as I can!